History of Pottery and Potters in Ancient Jerusalem

This book surveys four thousand years of pottery production and presents totally unexpected fresh information, using technical and analytical methods. It provides a study of ancient pottery of Jerusalem, from the earliest settlement to the medieval city and brings to light important aspects that cannot be discovered by the commonly accepted morphological pottery descriptions. New insights include the discovery that third millennium BCE pottery appears to have been produced by nomadic families, middle Bronze Age ceramics were made by professional potters in the Wadi Refaim, the pottery market of the Iron Age II pottery cannot be closely dated and is still produced during the first centuries after the exile, and the new shapes are made by Greek immigrant potters. The book contains a chapter on the systematics of ceramic studies and numerous notes about the potters themselves.

...This work by H. Franken provides a solid and valuable overview of the developments that took place within the ceramic production at and/or near Jerusalem during several millennia. ...the book forms a good apologia for the contextual study of ceramics, which was for this work based on Franken's notion of ceramic traditions. ...as Franken stated throughout his long and fruitful career, the studyof ceramic assemblages has to transcend its purpose for dating layers and to focus on the study of the context of the production and distribution of ceramics to obtain a valuable insight into a society. It is regretted that archaeologists in this region and especially those working on the biblical period remain reluctant to fully implement this notion, which has so many advantages as testified by this book and [its] visionary author. Bibiotheca Orientalis LXVI 5/6 This volume is significant and its publication is celebrated because it contains hard data, i.e., primary evidence from Kenyon's excavations that will always be important and valuable to students of Jerusalem's archaeology. The archaeological community owes Franken a debt of gratitude for undertaking this study and seeing it through to completion. Jane Cahill, BASOR 346

H. J. Franken, who died in 2005, was Emeritus Professor at the State University Leiden, The Netherlands, and the author of Excavations at Tell Deir 'Alla: The Late Bronze Sanctuary (Louvain, 1992) and of numerous articles on Near Eastern archaeology.